The Music Mountain

The classical world’s most coveted retreat.

At Marlboro, Mitsuko Uchida and Richard Goode preserve the legacy of Rudolf Serkin, who wished to create a “community, almost utopian,” devoted to the chamber-music repertory.Credit EDWARD SOREL

Mitsuko Uchida, one of the world’s leading classical pianists, could comfortably pass her summers flying from one festival to another, staying in luxury hotels and private villas. Instead, she stays on the campus of Marlboro College, a small liberal-arts institution in southern Vermont. Since 1951, the college has hosted Marlboro Music, an outwardly low-key summer gathering that functions variously as a chamber-music festival, a sort of finishing school for gifted young performers, and a clandestine summit for the musical intelligentsia. Uchida and the pianist Richard Goode serve as Marlboro’s co-directors, alternating the lead role from year to year; last summer, when I visited three times, Uchida was in residence from late June until early August. She plays a variety of roles in the Marlboro world—high priest, den mother, provocateur, jester, and arbiter of style.

Marlboro, whose fifty-ninth session gets under way next week, is a singular phenomenon. The great Austrian-born pianist Rudolf Serkin, Marlboro’s co-founder and longtime leader, once declared that he wished to “create a community, almost utopian,” where artists could forget about commerce and escape into a purely musical realm. Marlboro has been compared to a kibbutz, a hippie commune, Shangri-La, a cult (but “a good cult”), Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study, and George Orwell’s Animal Farm, where “all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” On certain lazy days, it becomes a highbrow summer camp, where brainy musicians go swimming in the local pond.

At Marlboro, Uchida follows a set routine. Between nine-thirty and ten in the morning, she arrives at the campus coffee shop, where breakfast is served to those who have missed the morning buffet in the dining hall. Young musicians slouch on blue and purple couches around the room, and she stops to chat with them. Aside from her Peggy Guggenheim sunglasses—a bright-blue model with pointy edges, patterned after a Venetian Carnival mask—she dresses simply, often wearing sweatpants and a sweatshirt emblazoned with the name Marlboro. One day last summer, “House of the Rising Sun” was playing on the coffee-shop stereo; this gave way to a Scott Joplin rag. Uchida shimmied to the music as she approached the counter to place her order. Her favorite dish is the Egg McMarlboro, a sandwich made with a fried egg, local tomato, Vermont Cheddar, and bacon. Most patrons are served on paper plates, but Uchida’s dish was carried out on a wooden tray, with a cappuccino in a china cup.

Matan Porat, an Israeli-born composer and pianist with an impressively tangled, Beethoven-like mane, sat down across from Uchida and noticed the cappuccino. “Nice!” he said. “I didn’t know they were doing it.”

“Actually, they are not,” she said. “But they do it for me. I must allow myself a few small luxuries.” She smiled sweetly and took a sip.

The oboist James Austin Smith, a recent graduate of the Yale School of Music, flopped down on the adjacent couch, propping sandalled feet on the table. Oboists, with their limited chamber repertory, have less reason to be intimidated by the pianist than others who may dream of performing with her; in any case, Smith and Uchida had struck up a playful rapport. Smith announced that he was adding some ornaments, or unwritten musical elaborations, to his part in a Haydn symphony that the musicians were presenting informally that night.

Uchida speaks a language that can only be described as Uchida. In 1961, when she was twelve, her father, a Japanese diplomat, was appointed Ambassador to Austria, and she spent her adolescence in Vienna, becoming fluent in German. In her early twenties, she moved to London, which remains her home, and she acquired a kind of Japanese-Austrian-British accent. (Queen Elizabeth II recently named her Dame Mitsuko.) Her many summers at Marlboro have allowed her to take on a sizable American vocabulary, which she is always seeking to expand. “What is ‘ditzy’?” she asked at one point. “Not so bright? Talkative but not so bright? O.K.! Gotcha!” Her speech falls into a pattern of stagily soaring phrases followed by rat-a-tat bursts. At breakfast, she holds everyone transfixed with a barrage of stories, epigrams, and snap judgments. On a rising instrumentalist: “For the Germans, the greatest thing since Karajan. Karajan, of course, was the greatest thing since Hitler.” On a veteran singer: “She has nothing in her brain, but she is a fantastic coach.” On a celebrated conductor: “Obviously, he has charisma. But I don’t want charisma. I want something other than charisma.” On prodigies: “Do you want yourself to be operated on by a genius twenty-year-old heart surgeon? Do you want to go to the theatre and see a teen-ager play King Lear?” Such comments are often punctuated by a wildly oscillating laugh that sounds like a flock of songbirds ready to be transcribed by Olivier Messiaen. When she is preparing to throw one of her verbal darts, she narrows her eyes and purses her lips. When she has words of praise, she opens her eyes wide, raises one hand to her heart, and draws in her breath sharply.

It was the last week of June. The Marlboro population—thirteen pianists, forty-three string players, sixteen wind and brass players, and nine singers, along with a staff of administrators, coaches, schedulers, librarians, recording engineers, piano technicians, receptionists, interns, cooks, babysitters, and a lifeguard—had been in residence for a week. They had settled into dorm rooms, apartments, and cabins. Some were surprised to find themselves reverting to a collegiate life style, sharing a bathroom and hanging out late at night. But all of them knew that a successful term at Marlboro can practically assure one’s career. More than a hundred alumni hold jobs in eight leading American orchestras, twenty-two in the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra alone. The most venerable of American string quartets, the Guarneri, which retires later this year, formed at Marlboro in 1964. The Emerson, Juilliard, Orion, and St. Lawrence Quartets also have Marlboro connections, and Murray Perahia, Joshua Bell, and Hilary Hahn received early guidance there. Peter Serkin, Rudolf’s son, made his début at Marlboro in 1958, at the age of eleven, and went on to have a major career.

Uchida keeps returning because she cherishes the chance to immerse herself in music in a way that no other institution allows. “I was here when I was very young, in 1974,” she told me. “I had a wonderful time, but I didn’t quite understand. When I came back, in 1992”— Serkin had died the previous year, and Uchida became an unofficial adviser, with an official appointment following in 1999—“then I understood. I got hooked. In Marlboro, you get a different way of not only looking at the world but also of looking at life. If you spend weeks together, day in and day out, eating the meals together, chatting and sitting around and drinking the beer together and God knows what, you begin to get a basic outline of what it really means to be a musician, as opposed to flying from one city to the next and rehearsing the ‘Archduke’ Trio for half an hour and then already walking onstage. Ultimately, Marlboro is about the concept of time. We have time to rehearse, time simply to think. But never quite enough time. Time slows down and time accelerates.”

After breakfast, Uchida practices in her apartment for several hours, going through her repertory for the coming season. Those spells of exploration have become vital to her evolution. When she first made her name, in the nineteen-eighties, as a Mozart specialist, she was noted chiefly for her fluid phrasing and her lustrous tone. Over the years, her repertory has broadened—at a Carnegie Hall recital last year, she combined pieces by Bach with the elegantly cryptic works of the contemporary Hungarian composer György Kurtág—and her performances have taken on philosophical depth. In late sonatas of Beethoven and Schubert, she summons a fractured, even violent emotional landscape without committing anything like an excessive gesture. Mozart remains her home ground. On the same night that James Smith inserted his cheeky ornaments into Haydn’s Symphony No. 96, Uchida joined a small Marlboro orchestra to read through Mozart’s Piano Concerto in A, K. 414. The instrumental playing, with a few inexact entries, wasn’t quite perfect, but it had other advantages: the music-making was mellow, naturally flowing, affectionately human. Only a few dozen people heard the performance, and in its intimacy it probably came closer to Mozart’s own concerts than what we normally experience in a modern hall.

For decades, a sign has stood beside the road through the Marlboro campus: “Caution: Musicians at Play.”Performers are liberated from tight schedules; managers, agents, and publicity people do not watch from the wings. Works of Beethoven, Schubert, and Brahms melt into a landscape that resembles the pastoral settings from which those composers drew inspiration; when Uchida and a group of players rehearse a Dvorák quintet in a hut on a hillside, it mixes with fugues of birdsong and the ostinato of insects. Wireless Internet aside, participants are effectively isolated in a pre-modern existence where one walks around all day and eats meals at long tables in a community that includes both toddlers and octogenarians. Above all, as Uchida says, Marlboro achieves a stretching out and slowing down of time. One musician after another says the same thing: from September to May, when they sit down to play in an antiseptic postwar performing-arts center after an hour or two of rehearsal, they close their eyes and think of Marlboro.

Rudolf Serkin—or Mr. Serkin, as Marlboro people still call him—haunts the campus where he spent the last forty summers of his life. Marlboro’s split personality, its refusal to decide between Teutonic solemnity and all-American anarchy, reflects Serkin’s character. A musician of manic dedication, he practiced scales for hours on end and, in ensemble rehearsals, agonized over details until his collaborators were ready to crawl out of their skins. At other times, he behaved like a madcap schoolboy. He was famous for staging pranks; Arnold Steinhardt, the first violinist of the Guarneri Quartet, remembers the time a cherry bomb exploded under the hood of his car.

The violinist and violist Philipp Naegele came to Marlboro during the first summer and has returned some fifty times since. “What do I remember about Serkin?” he says. “Oh, the immense vitality. He had a real farm on a dirt road, with a peach orchard, horses, chickens, whatever one has. And he would go back and forth between the mud and the cows and the children and dogs and Beethoven. His vitality was inseparable from his physical groundedness. He was a great hiker, always going up in the mountains. Like Gustav Mahler. He looked a bit like Mahler, too. He had hands twice as wide and twice as heavy as anybody else’s hands, and he could play softer than anybody else, because he didn’t have to push. He ran a house that was absolutely impeccable, in terms of the décor, the art, the books, the food. But he had a sense of humor that was more than down to earth.”

Serkin was born in 1903 in Bohemia, to a family of impoverished Eastern European Jews. As Stephen Lehmann and Marion Faber recount, in a biography of the pianist, Serkin first displayed talent when he heard one of his sisters at the piano. “It’s all wrong,” the boy said, bursting into tears. At the age of nine, he went to study in Vienna, where he fell under the influence of Eugenie Schwarzwald, a pedagogue and social activist. Through Schwarzwald, Serkin encountered Adolf Loos, Oskar Kokoschka, Karl Popper, and Arnold Schoenberg, with whom he studied composition. Schwarzwald’s summertime gatherings of luminaries in mountain retreats influenced Marlboro, as did Schoenberg’s Society for Private Musical Performances, which tried to break free of commercial concert culture.

The dominant force in Serkin’s life was the German violinist Adolf Busch, a brilliant player who detested virtuoso showmanship and devoted himself in almost monkish fashion to the heights of the German chamber and solo repertory. Serkin met Busch in 1920, when he was still in his teens, and adopted the violinist’s belief system. “It’s the philosophy of Werktreue, of being absolutely faithful to the score,” Richard Goode, who came to Marlboro when he was fifteen, says. “People may discuss the limitations of that approach today, but back then their idealism was so important.” (Goode carries on the tradition in sovereign performances of Bach, Beethoven, Schubert, and Chopin, his self-effacing tastefulness causing him to be perennially underrated.) Serkin joined Busch’s household and, in 1935, married the violinist’s daughter Irene. The two men appeared as a duo across Europe, setting standards for chamber-music performance. Busch also led the Busch Quartet, whose sinewy recordings of Beethoven and Schubert mesmerized the young Mitsuko Uchida.

When Hitler came to power, Serkin’s German career ended swiftly, and Busch, who was not Jewish, responded by cancelling all his German engagements. He paid a price for this rare act of solidarity: when he tried to establish himself in the United States, where he moved in 1939, he made little headway, his slightly astringent tone failing to please audiences accustomed to the sweet tones of Heifetz and Kreisler. In 1940, Busch suffered a heart attack, which further limited his public career. He moved to the small Vermont town of Guilford, with his daughter and son-in-law living in the house next door. The surroundings reminded the émigrés of Switzerland and the Vienna Woods.

The idea arose that Busch and his brother, the cellist Herman, should join several other refugees—the French flutist Marcel Moyse; Moyse’s son Louis; and Louis’s wife, the violinist Blanche Honegger Moyse—in running a summer music school at Marlboro College, which had started up in 1946, on the site of a nearby dairy farm. At first, Serkin had no intention of being closely involved. Busch provided Marlboro’s core philosophy: the notion of master musicians guiding neophytes, the emphasis on rehearsal and conversation over performance and publicity. (Busch complained that New York musicians were obsessed with “covering everything and just getting the notes right. . . . A love of music was rarely present.”) After Busch’s death, in 1952, Serkin took over, and remained Marlboro’s director until his death.

In the early years, chaos reigned on the business end, with Serkin donating much of his concert income to keep the operation afloat. (Anointed by Toscanini, Serkin fared much better in America than Busch did.) Naegele remembers that some prospective students walked into the dining hall—formerly a cow barn—and then walked out, unable to believe that a ragtag group of beer-drinking, pipe-smoking foreigners had anything to offer. But young musicians soon understood what they had to gain by attending, and by the nineteen-sixties Marlboro was renowned. The Columbia label issued best-selling recordings in the Music from Marlboro series. The cellist Pablo Casals began visiting in 1960, his fame attracting international press. After a certain point, Serkin, innately suspicious of publicity, started to shun inquiries from the outside world. This wary attitude persists. Marlboro-ites ruefully tell of a celebrated young pianist who, a few years back, dropped by for a week or two and said, “You know, this place could be really famous!” It would rather not.

Yo-Yo Ma and Emanuel Ax are two of the hundreds of musicians who have made the pilgrimage. On August 3, 1973, they played their first concert together, in a Marlboro performance of Brahms’s Piano Quartet in C Minor. They recalled their experiences recently over coffee at Café Ronda, near Lincoln Center.

“We had met at the Juilliard cafeteria,” Ax said. “We ended up being roommates at Marlboro, although you were never in the room. You were always with Jill.”

“I met Jill, my wife, at Marlboro,” Ma explained.

“Do you remember the dress rehearsal of the Brahms, when Mr. Serkin came? He had this thing—whatever was printed in the music, that’s how you play. If, say, the upper register has a note that is very difficult, and it would be easier to play that one note with your left hand, you don’t do it.” Ax mentioned Beethoven’s “Hammerklavier” Sonata, which begins with a rapid leap in the left hand. The easy way out is to split the leap between the hands. “Somebody did that in an audition. That was it.”

“Zank you very much! ” Ma said, in the Serkin accent. “Zank you very much for findink ze time! ”

“That guy could have played like Horowitz, and he would not have gotten in,” Ax went on. “So, in the Brahms, there is a horrible spot in the last movement, where I couldn’t stretch my hand wide enough to play this one chord. So I rolled it. ‘Ach! ’ Serkin said. ‘There is no arpeggiando on that chord.’ ‘I know, Mr. Serkin, but my hand isn’t big enough.’ And he said, ‘Don’t worry! In the concert, it will grow a little bit.’ ”

“He said your hand will grow?” Ma asked.

“A little bit, yes. What happened was, I played the chord, and I also played every note in between. And that was O.K. He was happy with that.”

Whereas Ax idolized Serkin—that summer, he spoke only briefly with the great man, unable to find the courage to have an extended conversation—Ma stood in awe of Pablo Casals, who had performed for Queen Victoria in his youth and remained active into his nineties.

“I played for Casals in a class,” Ma said. “He kept saying, ‘I can’t hear you! I can’t hear you!’ That was the feedback. But it was great, especially when he conducted the orchestra in—I think it was Beethoven’s Fourth. Because here’s this guy who had to use an oxygen thing backstage, who needed two people to walk him out. You think he is about to see death. And then the music starts.” Ma impersonated an ancient, shrunken man coming to life, growing in stature, raising his arms high in the air and roaring vague commands: “Nooooo! . . . Beethoven! . . . M-u-u-usic! . . . Crescendo! ” Ma went on, “I wasn’t so sure that I wanted to have a musical career at that time. I wasn’t sure that music was all it was cracked up to be. But to see a guy like that, way past retirement age, getting it up for Beethoven’s Fourth—where does this energy come from? And I realized there was something very potent at work.”

Each senior figure had a distinctive approach. Moyse, the master of the French school of flute playing, had his students read through opera arias so that they learned to imitate the human voice. The Polish-born pianist Mieczyslaw Horszowski said little, sometimes merely pointing and smiling at a passage in a score. Felix Galimir, a supremely cultivated Viennese violinist,* coached players in the psychology of chamber music, where, as Ax says, “no one leads and no one follows.” Alexander Schneider, of the Budapest Quartet, was a Russian-accented volcano, exhorting and berating his charges. And Isidore Cohen, the longtime violinist of the Beaux Arts Trio, encouraged independence. Ma said, “He’d look at you, smoking a cigarette, and say, ‘What do you think? Should there be a decrescendo?’ He’d force you to make choices.”

“Maybe there were some at Marlboro who used the idea of chamber music like a club—a club to beat people with,” Ax added. He assumed the tone of an unctuously disapproving elder: “ ‘I know he plays the instrument well, but he doesn’t know about cha-a-a-a-mber music.’ But in the end there was no orthodoxy.”

“There couldn’t be,” Ma said. “Because you were seeing all these different characters with their different approaches being passionate in different ways.”

Uchida and Goode admire what Busch and Serkin created and have no wish to alter the formula. But they have put their imprint on the institution. “When I first came back, in ’92, every second word was ‘Rudi never did that,’ ‘Mr. Serkin never did that,’ ” Uchida told me. “Nobody says things like that anymore. Richard and I really work very hard on that. The place is more open—yeah, sure. I always keep my antennae going. I watch out for the ones who need more care. The ones who are very gifted but not, you know, whiz kids. That’s why I go to the coffee shop all the time. I sniff around. I always know who is going out with whom—Richard has no idea! And, look, Richard and I, we are both oddballs. But we have careers. And that is what I say to the kids—if I can have a career, anyone can have a career.”

In the old days, with various male egos competing for the upper hand, there was something almost macho about Marlboro. Uchida, both as a personality and as a performer, projects authority without demanding it. Last summer, the mezzo-soprano Rebecca Ringle recalled what Uchida said after rehearsing the Mozart A-Major Concerto: “She said of one passage, ‘It’s happy but it’s powerful. It’s the way women can be now—happy, good, beautiful, powerful.’ And I almost cried when I heard that, because that’s what she is. She’s so elfin but really powerful and definitely feminine and totally intelligent.”

The Uchida summers and the Goode summers have distinct identities. Goode tends to bring about a looser, more libertine atmosphere. “He’s such an incredibly sweet man, off in his own world,” one musician said to me. “He thinks of music instead of himself. He’s so funny in rehearsal. Sometimes he’ll say, ‘Let’s do that again,’ not because the passage needs work but simply because he loves it and wants to hear it one more time. Mitsuko is more intense. She is always watching, always listening. When she says, ‘Ben Beilman is quite good,’ everyone notices.” (Beilman is an eerily mature nineteen-year-old violinist who studies at the Curtis Institute, in Philadelphia.) “Together, the two of them are the perfect substitute parents.”

Most young musicians who are accepted at Marlboro spend two or three consecutive summers there. Over the winter, hundreds audition for the small number of spots that open up annually. When I asked Goode to define what qualities he and Uchida were seeking, he said, “A certain technical excellence is a prerequisite. But you also listen for urgency, emotional reality. Maybe that is the primary thing in the end. I guess you could call it ‘musicality.’ You can often hear it right away. There’s a story that when Murray Perahia auditioned for Marlboro he played the C-Minor Impromptu of Schubert, which begins with fortissimo Gs.” Goode imitated the sound. “And after that Horszowski supposedly turned to Serkin and said, ‘Let’s take him.’ ” Uchida puts it in her pithy way: “As a rule, the imaginative ones are lacking the technique and the ones that have good technique haven’t got a clue. But there are exceptions to the rule, and we try to snap them up.”

Marlboro is designed so that the youth contingent receives guidance from several generations of older musicians: “seniors,” veterans who have been coming to Marlboro for years, and “junior seniors,” established younger players who serve as intermediaries between the generations. Anthony Checchia, Frank Salomon, and Philip Maneval serve as Marlboro’s administrators, binding the group together. They are keepers of Marlboro’s traditions—for example, the rule that all members of the community should take turns waiting on tables in the dining hall. Salomon says, “One of the great things is to see somebody who’s here for the first time, a nineteen- or twenty-one-year-old kid, looking up to see Mitsuko Uchida or Arnold Steinhardt, or someone else they’ve idolized for ten or fifteen years, asking, ‘What would you like to drink?’ ”

Last summer, the repertory at Marlboro included two hundred and twenty-one works by seventy composers. In a given week, there may be more than two hundred rehearsals, in studios, classrooms, and common spaces around the campus, all activity coördinated on a color-coded schedule board. The Central European golden age predominates—Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Dvorák, Brahms—although a fair amount of contemporary music and offbeat fare figures in the mix. One or two composers are in residence each summer; last year, the German composer Jörg Widmann coached his “Hunt Quartet,” in which players swish the air with their bows. For the first three weeks, Marlboro participants do nothing but rehearse; in July, they begin putting on weekend concerts for a paying public, in a six-hundred-and-thirty-seat hall. As rehearsals progress, senior members meet on Thursday evenings to devise a schedule for those groups which feel ready to perform. Although everyone insists that the rehearsals matter more than the performances, a competitive edge seeps in.

One muggy Saturday, I spent a day watching one rehearsal after another. The common room of the Happy Valley dormitory, a drab space with triangular eaves and a carpet purplish-gray in color, was a hub of activity. In the morning, three musicians in their late twenties and early thirties—the violinist Viviane Hagner, the cellist Priscilla Lee, and the pianist Jonathan Biss—were preparing Beethoven’s Piano Trio Opus 1 No. 2. Biss, an exacting and poetic player who first came to Marlboro when he was sixteen, talked more than the others, although he couched his ideas in politely tentative fashion. “I was thinking of playing a slightly faster grace note. You hate it? Any feeling?”; “You can make a crescendo and I will blithely ignore you and go on my merry way.” They worked on a repeating phrase, so that it initially had a sunny sound and later darkened. Lee drew a smiley face over the first instance. This led to a digression on the topic of messages that musicians write on their parts to remind themselves when they need to give a cue to other players (“ME!” or “Q”) or when they need to fold out a hidden extra page (“Open the stupid page, motherfucker!” is an extreme example).

In the New Presser building, four wind players—the flutist Joshua Smith, the oboist Jaren Philleo, the clarinettist Romie de Guise-Langlois, and the bassoonist William Winstead—were wrestling with Elliott Carter’s “Eight Études and a Fantasy,” a ferociously difficult 1950 work in a more or less atonal idiom. Winstead and Smith hold lead positions with the Cincinnati and Cleveland Orchestras, while Guise-Langlois was recently a member of Juilliard and Carnegie Hall’s élite Academy program and Philleo plays in the Louisiana Philharmonic. The mood in the room was tense; the musicians felt frustrated by the score, which, they thought, wasn’t giving them quite enough information. Winstead puzzled over a stream of eighth notes that were divided into groups of five and seven. Inevitably, such phrases break down into subsidiary units of two and three, but the bassoonist couldn’t decide where those breaks should fall.

“How about in the last half of 78 I play three plus two plus two,” Winstead said. “No, wait—what if it were two plus two plus three?”

The players tried again but weren’t convinced. They passed around a miniature score so they could see how the parts intermeshed. They started in once more, then broke down, amid exclamations of “Argh!” and “Shit!”

Winstead reflected on how the slow pace at Marlboro had made him look afresh at music that he thought he knew well. He spoke about playing the Carter on the concert circuit: “You’re not asking ‘What’s it all about?’ You’re just trying to stay together and get through it. I’ve never delved into these kinds of details before.”

Smith attempted to rally the others. “When in doubt, the theme is in the flute,” he said.

Back at Happy Valley, Uchida had arrived for a pair of rehearsals, and was fussing with a recalcitrant dehumidifier. “You jiggle and whack and kick, and it works,” she said. She is particular about the health of her instruments and has had a dehumidifier installed in every room with a piano. Her first rehearsal was of Schubert’s Piano Trio in E-Flat. Joining her were Soovin Kim, a thirty-three-year-old violinist whose subtle expressivity suits Uchida’s style, and David Soyer, an eighty-six-year-old legend of the chamber-music world, who played cello in the Guarneri Quartet for most of its existence. Soyer, who affects a perpetually put-upon demeanor, is famous for claiming insistently that pianists always play too loudly when they join chamber groups. He is also possessive of his music stand, which carries the notice “David Soyer’s PERSONAL stand. HANDS OFF!”

The three musicians had reached the slow movement of the Schubert, which opens with one of the most famous inventions in chamber music: softly marching chords on the piano, a plaintive cello melody featuring a repeated trill. Soyer, grunting softly as he played, brought to bear a nobly restrained tone and rhythmically incisive phrasing. He lavished attention on a pair of trills that lead into the hushed coda, wistfully prolonging the second as it precipitated a shift from C major to C minor. Kim executed everything with unfailing precision—so much so that the older players actually encouraged him to be less precise at times. “A little more Wiener schmalz,” Soyer suggested at one point, demonstrating a slide from note to note, like a carelessly dragging foot. “You can’t play sloppy!” Uchida said, teasingly. Kim protested that he could indeed play sloppy, and tried again, laying on a modicum of schmalz. Uchida received only a single citation for being too loud. In accompanimental passages, she achieved the feat of almost disappearing, so that the piano became a nimbus of timbre floating around the string voices.

When Soyer and Kim left, the young soprano Charlotte Dobbs entered, ready to work with Uchida on Schoenberg’s “The Book of the Hanging Gardens,” a song cycle on poems by the German Symbolist Stefan George. Uchida had never played the songs and was making a close study not only of the music but also of George’s poetry. Dobbs, a sunny-tempered woman with a rapid-fire manner of speech, held her own; a recent graduate of Yale, she majored in English and wrote her thesis on Shakespeare and Joyce. With Dobbs, Uchida was noticeably more free-spirited than with the two male players, indulging in giggles, literary digressions, and spells of self-criticism.

“Schoenberg’s music is echt Viennese,” Uchida said. “When you get to ‘Schnäbel kräuseln,’ I hear a sort of Viennese nasal sound. No? And not ‘klagend’ but ‘kl-a-a-a-gend.’ ” She prompted Dobbs to bring out the rhythms more strongly, to accent certain consonants, to clarify the diction in places. Uchida also emphasized the differences between German and other languages. “You are singing it almost as if it were French,” the pianist said. “French is very quick and even. ‘Le président de la République a annoncé aujourd’hui dah-dah-dah-dah-dah.’ Japanese is kind of similar.” She sang a fragment of a Japanese folk song, with a slight grimace. “German is more flowing, up and down.”

Dobbs ventured a few suggestions. “I think I can bring more excitement to the tone when I sing ‘reichsten Lade,’ ” she said. “Try to do something silky. Put more dazzle in the voice. Can we try a slightly more flowing tempo?”

“Yes, I am maybe too slow,” Uchida replied.

The duo arrived at the climax of the cycle, a violently expressive song that, as Dobbs observed, communicates “every possible emotion you could feel in love with someone, except for satisfaction.” Beneath the word wahr, or “true,” there is a strangely shuddering whole-note chord consisting of a B-major triad with C-sharps attached; Schoenberg has marked it with a crescendo, which is technically an impossibility for a sustained chord, but with a coaxing of the pedal Uchida made it resonate through the bar.

By the end of the afternoon, sunshine had given way to a downpour. An S.U.V. was summoned to transport Uchida back to her apartment. Dobbs and I rode with her. “The pure major becomes so nasty,” she said, of that weird B-major chord. “I love it. So dark, so beautiful. This is fun, yeah? But bloody hard.”

Marlboro’s most famous tradition is the paper-napkin-ball war that erupts most nights during dinner. History does not record whether Mr. Serkin originated the practice, but he was a lusty participant from the beginning. One night, when Queen Elisabeth of Belgium was passing through, the pianist Leon Fleisher had to raise an umbrella to shield her from bombardment. Uchida does not take part. “I am very good at making,” she told me. “There is a technique. Pack in the corner, lightly, that is the idea. But I don’t throw. If I start throwing, I will be such a target.”

Other hoary Marlboro rituals include an annual square dance; the International Dinner, at which the musicians cook up dishes from various cultures and afterward present comedy skits (Uchida impersonations are frequent); and pranks in the Serkin manner. The tour-de-force prank of last summer took the form of an extended fantasia on the sign attached to David Soyer’s music stand in Happy Valley. One morning, people awoke to find that hundreds of objects across the campus had been festooned with signs declaring them to be Soyer’s property. “It was something unbelievable,” Uchida told me. “Everything had a sign. ‘David Soyer’s PERSONAL Baby Chair.’ ‘David Soyer’s PERSONAL Water Jugs.’ ‘David Soyer’s PERSONAL Exit Sign.’ All the cars in the parking lot. Every chair in the dining hall. Ugly painting in the coffee shop: ‘David Soyer’s PERSONAL Ugly Painting.’ It can’t have been one person. I cannot imagine the man-hours it took. We still don’t know who did it, although I have some ideas. Such secrets stay with me!”

Some newcomers roll their eyes at Marlboro’s customs. Joshua Smith, the urbane Cleveland Orchestra flutist, initially squirmed at the prospect of the square dance. “Do we have to?” he asked at dinner one night. But he grew to love the magic-mountain atmosphere of the place. “I wish I could somehow package this feeling and bring it back home with me to Cleveland,” he said. Others complained of hearing too many Serkin stories, or of being dragged on too many picnics, or of being inundated with Germanic repertory. One young musician jokingly scripted a mock infomercial: “Remember a time when only German music was considered important? When Poulenc was not allowed? At Marlboro, you can live that time again.” But sooner or later the skeptics fell into reveries about playing Mozart while gazing at trees in the late-afternoon light. And Poulenc is indeed played, on occasion.

There is a conscious plan behind the quirky lore. Marlboro is a long-running experiment in altering the metabolism of city-based performers. When Serkin began inviting his colleagues to Vermont, he wanted them to lose their worldliness, to fall into a slower rhythm. Uchida agrees, and proposes that Marlboro’s quaint habits have a specific musical application. “The kids have to become more naïve,” she told me. “Because there is something very naïve about this music that they play, even the very greatest. What is it about? Mountains, trees, birds, young love, that kind of thing. Of course, there is quite a bit more to it than that, but you must grasp the simplicity of the surface.”

After dinner, the musicians gravitate to the coffee shop, where they often remain until late in the night. The conversation has the typical tempo and jargon of Generations X and Y, although the references are idiosyncratic (“Your fiddle was made in 1717, too? Oh, my God, that’s so weird”). There’s discussion of odd things that audience members say to performers after concerts (“I sometimes get suggestions for different things I could do with my hair,” Rebecca Ringle said); of the perils of travelling with instruments on planes (“They said I’d have to check my viola case, so I took the viola with me on the plane and cradled it in my lap the whole way, like a baby,” the violist Kyle Armbrust recalled); and of the relative lack of scandal at Marlboro this summer (“Last summer was a summer of Sappho”). Instrumentalists talk about hearing Schubert songs such as “Der Doppelgänger” for the first time; singers learn how to name Mozart concertos by Köchel number; Uchida is urged to listen to Björk.

Uchida usually appears in the coffee shop on the early side, then heads off to bed, or, as she puts it, “sneaks away without anyone noticing.” One night, I dropped by her apartment for a visit. “Here is one of the finest residences of Marlboro,” she said with mock pride, after negotiating a sticky lock. “It even has a bathroom.” It was a one-bedroom basement apartment with white cement walls, sparsely furnished and wanly lit. Uchida lived here alone, although her partner, the British diplomat Robert Cooper, joined her on the final weekend. The piano was piled high with music that Uchida was studying. On a bookshelf was some not particularly light summer reading: the Inferno, “Hamlet,” W. G. Sebald’s “Austerlitz,” volumes of Yeats and Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Stefan Zweig’s autobiography, in German. As we spoke, Uchida set out two more little luxuries she permits herself: First Flush Darjeeling tea and Marcolini chocolates.

In some ways, Uchida is even more high-minded than Serkin, who surprised people by praising Vladimir Horowitz, the arch-virtuoso and the un-Serkin. Uchida has few kind words for several leading virtuosos of today. Her remarks were off the record. “I talk only about people whom I love,” she said. Her warmest words were for the Romanian pianist Radu Lupu, whom she calls “the most talented guy I have ever met.” She describes how she once tried to get Lupu to visit Marlboro. “I got very excited, describing how people do nothing but play music all day long. But he said no. His explanation was very funny. ‘Mitsuko,’ he said, ‘I don’t like music as much as you.’ ”

Her voice took on a confiding tone as she spoke of the composers with whom she spends her days. “Beethoven was the greatest altogether. Mozart was the greatest genius. And Schubert . . . ” She drew in her breath, her eyes opening wide, her head tilting back. “He is the most beautiful. He is the one you will be listening to when you die.” And then she spoke of a friend of hers who, on his deathbed, in a state of great pain, was offered morphine and refused it. “He knew that he would die only once. He wanted to see what it felt like. That is some sort of a person, yes? It is a great pity that you can’t come back to tell the tale.”

The Marlboro summer customarily ends on a Sunday afternoon in August, with a festive performance of Beethoven’s “Choral Fantasy,” for piano, chorus, and orchestra. Serkin used to bang it out at unbelievable volume, causing the piano, the floor, the walls, and, possibly, the Green Mountains to shake. Beethoven wrote the work in 1808, for a legendarily overlong benefit concert that also included the premières of his Fifth and Sixth Symphonies. Composing in a hurry, he produced an uncharacteristically baggy piece that nonetheless surges with life. The main tune looks forward unmistakably to the “Ode to Joy,” in the Ninth Symphony. The text celebrates the power of art to dispel the storm and stress of daily life. To quote from Philipp Naegele’s translation:

When the magic sounds enchant

And the word’s solemnity speaks forth,

Glorious things must come to be,

Night and storms then turn to light.

In a way, the “Choral Fantasy” is Beethoven’s Ninth without the world-historical baggage—the perpetually unfulfilled promise of liberation. Instead, it is an anthem of music’s celebration of itself. Hence, perhaps, Serkin’s abiding love for the piece.

Goode told me, “Many people felt that Serkin playing the ‘Choral Fantasy’ was a unique experience that could never be duplicated. After he died, the work was retired, and I thought that was the right decision. To my surprise, a few years later people said, ‘You know, I think we have to have a “Choral Fantasy.” ’ We needed the catharsis.”

It is never an especially polished affair. Serkin instituted the practice of inviting staff members, supporters, and musically inclined neighbors to sing in the chorus. Members of Marlboro’s vocal program take the solos, guaranteeing that at least some of the singing will be on pitch and at full power, but there are always odd noises. In what had to be considered the final prank of the summer, one of the singers, the generally discerning tenor William Ferguson, decided that I should join the chorus. Trained as a pianist and an oboist, I have practically no singing experience, but nonetheless I was herded into the baritone section for the final rehearsal. I stood in front of two formidable young singers, the baritone John Moore and the bass-baritone Jeremy Galyon, who encircled me with such stentorian tones that I could almost believe I was making them myself. “I heard you,” Ferguson said afterward, a little ambiguously.

At the podium was the pianist and conductor Ignat Solzhenitsyn, who grew up in Cavendish, Vermont, fifty miles to the north of Marlboro. His father, the novelist, had died the week before, and he had just returned from the funeral, in Moscow. The orchestra was a mixture of Marlboro-ites junior and senior, with Arnold Steinhardt sitting uncomplainingly in the back row and Soovin Kim serving as concertmaster. (Steinhardt wore a sign on his back: “Property of David Soyer.”) In trading Beethoven’s ideas back and forth, the musicians were recapitulating in musical terms relationships that had formed over the summer. Uchida smiled or wiggled her eyebrows when different players took up the principal melody, as if resuming conversations that she had begun over Eggs McMarlboro at the coffee shop.

“It’s great,” Rebecca Ringle said to me during a break in the rehearsal. “You know everyone. Romie gets the theme, then James gets the theme.”

The hall was packed for the performance, with many longtime friends of Marlboro in the crowd. Uchida assumed concert mode, unleashing the full strength of her mighty left hand in the ominous C-minor chords that open the piece. Throughout, she indulged in a bit more Romantic flamboyance than she ordinarily allows herself. She also issued a smattering of wrong notes, as if in tribute to Serkin’s philosophy of seeking the perfection beyond precision—the truth of the noblest, most honest effort. The great moment for the chorus comes in the insistently joyous setting of the line “When love and strength are wed”: “Und Kraft! Und Kraft! Und Kr-a-a-a-a-ft! ” I had the feeling of being carried along by an enormous wave, and, however approximate the sound coming from my throat, it added to the power of the mass. And I reflected on the fact that even the most exalted music-making comes from an accumulation of everyday labor, inseparable from human relationships.

“It was at least inspired,” Uchida said afterward. “Not the cleanest, but bloody inspired.”

On my way home, driving along Route 9 toward the interstate, I took a detour and stopped at a little white church in Guilford. Rudolf Serkin is buried in the churchyard there, a few feet away from Adolf Busch. The violinist’s name is almost hidden by thick-growing bushes, which metaphorically suggest what Busch and Serkin achieved when they came to America. At a time when Hitler was dragging German music into the mire, these pure spirits succeeded in transplanting their tradition to Vermont. In a wider sense, Marlboro represents the migration of tradition across centuries and continents: a Japanese-born woman passing along her understanding of Mozart and Schoenberg to new generations of American kids. Marlboro is an enchanting place, but, in the end, there is nothing especially remarkable about it. The remarkable thing is the power of music to put down roots wherever it goes. ♦

*Correction, November 11, 2009: Felix Galimir was not Toscanini’s concertmaster in the NBC Symphony, as originally stated.

Alex Ross has been contributing to The New Yorker since 1993, and he became the magazine’s music critic in 1996.